Missing Christina

  “What’s it worth now?” I asked, grinning, and she grinned back and said crisply,

  “A million three. And everyone’s forgotten its history. Unless I remind them and lower its value by writing this book.” We had finished eating, and she stood up rather suddenly and began gathering the plates back onto the serving tray. “For dessert there are lemon curd tarts, not home made, with or without ice cream, or ice cream, and/or cheese. And coffee.”

  “What sort of ice cream?”

  “Cheapo vanilla. Baz did the shopping this week. That’s my brother. Baz isn’t short for Barry, but don’t ask.”

  “I won’t. Just cheese, please, and coffee? And can’t I help clear?”

  “Thanks, but it’s all just straight into the fridge or the dishwasher. Cheese it is.” I waited while she clattered around in the kitchen for a moment, then she came back to the table with a platter of cheese and crackers, with celery sticks. “You see, Dad did get a bit obsessed with the Belinda case. He was convinced Mrs Tate killed her, and I think he might’ve been right. Even when he was moved on to other jobs he kept going back to this case, until he was officially warned to leave it alone. The DPP had issued a nolle prosequi –” she glanced to see if I knew what that meant, and I nodded; Uncle Quentin had taught us a bit about legal procedures and terminology – “and although everyone pretty much thought Mrs Tate was guilty, there was no proof, and the family had some well-connected friends… So Dad was told to back off. Eventually he left the police and went in with Mum’s father and brother in their building firm. Dad’s father had been a carpenter and cabinet-maker, and Dad did a lot of that as a hobby. So he knew that buying this place was a good bet – it was horribly run-down, but solid, and still had a lot of original features, and he knew he could restore it. He meant it for an investment, a do-er-up-er, but when he’d finished he liked it so much he wanted to live here. And so did I and my brothers – nice suburb, near the beach and so on. We didn’t care about Belinda or what had happened, it was only Mum who didn’t care for it.

  “The house itself or the whole, er, Belinda thing?”

  “Mostly the latter.” She sighed, twining a piece of hair round one finger. “Dad couldn’t leave that case alone. Even once he was out of the police he kept on at it. Dad was sure Mrs Tate knew what had happened to Belinda. He also hated her for cooking up that abduction story, for using the mystery of the Beaumont children. He thought it unforgiveable insult to the Beaumont parents and the whole community. I agree, but I think his judgement got a bit skewed. He kept on and on at it. He’d kept all his notes and copies of interviews and so on from when he was on the case, masses of material, and he even went in with a private investigator once, but he couldn’t prove anything. He tried to write a book about it once, but he knew he was no writer.

  “And when he was dying he asked me to write about it. He said a historian has to be a detective in a way, and that I can write well. He left me all his notes and stuff, and he asked me to take a fresh look at the case and write it up. And I promised him I would.”

  “And do you think you’ll find out anything new?”

  “I doubt it. Oh – the coffee!” She darted back just in time to save it. The sound of the machine had been all but obscured by the rumbling of the storm building up outside. Filling our cups she said, resignedly, “All I’ve done that Dad never did is to get some old family stuff from one of Belinda’s cousins, and to write to Belinda’s old pen-friends. I think Dad had either forgotten he still had her old address book – which I suspect should properly have been entered into evidence, but he hung onto it – or he didn’t think he’d get anything out of contacting kids she’d written to ages before. Also, although he was intelligent, he wasn’t very well educated and he wouldn’t have been confident about writing to foreign people. Belinda had pen-friends all over the world, although I think she’d lost interest in most of them that last year or so.”

  “But you did contact them.”

  “Mmm, but I could only track down two of them. The woman in Montreal didn’t know anything about it, she’d always thought Belinda just stopped writing, and she’d long since thrown away old letters. I never thought anything would come of it… Jaques, there’s a thing: if it was your father who was Belinda’s pen-friend, why did you find that draft email to me, and those letters, in your mother’s papers?”

  “Because Mum always tidied up their stuff. And she would’ve told Dad about your letter, and he wouldn’t have cared much, so he would have told her to draft something to you. See, Dad took a double first at Oxford, Eng. Lit. and music, but when his band fell apart –”

  “I found an old video of theirs on YouTube the other night.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh come on, they weren’t bad. For their time.”

  “OK, they weren’t all that bad, although isn’t it remarkable how much Dad looked like Karen Carpenter? That fringe. But if Dad’s cousin hadn’t set up that recording studio then the record label they’d have played a few pub gigs then given up.”

  “Probably. But your father’s a good bass player.”

  “Yeah, he is. He still plays a bit. But he became a publisher, or at least joined the family publishing firm, and after thirty years of it he’s pretty much allergic to the written word. He’ll email if he has to, but texting is about his limit. Anything other than that his secretary does for him, or Mum used to.”

  “Yes, I see… More coffee?”

  “No, but thanks.” We hadn’t quite finished the wine, and dreamily I re-filled our glasses. As I did so our eyes met, and pale rosy colour surged up Marian’s face, then slowly ebbed. Before I could say anything, she looked away. In the silence, lightning cracked across the sky, making her jump.

  “Are you afraid of storms?” I asked.

  “No. I like them. Are you?”

  “No.”

  Thunder rumbled, and she said, as if against her will, “Emotional storms… those I’m afraid of.”

  “Ah.”

  Another crack of lightning. “Marian, I –”

  But she warned me off. “Would you like to see over the house? I mean, uh, I’ve got photos of it as it was when – when –”

  “Yes. I’d like to. And perhaps you’d better tell me more about the whole story.” Not that I cared, as long as I was with her, listening to her, sharing something with her.

  “The story’s fairly short. Belinda was adopted by unsuitable people, people who these days probably wouldn’t be allowed to adopt. Mr Tate was a simple, friendly, nice old chap, bit of a country bumpkin, uneducated, narrow, religious. Mrs Tate was a neurotic, spoilt bitch; her husband loved her, but he was the only one. She had psychological problems, today she’d probably be diagnosed borderline personality disorder, or narcissistic, I’ve asked a few psychologist friends and they all differ a bit. Let’s just say she didn’t like herself, had a vicious temper, would do anything to get her own way, and alienated everyone who wanted to love her. With no self-esteem, she had to destroy everyone else’s if she could.”

  “She sounds a monster!”

  “She pretty much was. I’ve only found about three people who liked her. Call her sad, loony, selfish, depressed – probably all those things. ʻMonster’ will do.”

  “But however was someone like that allowed to adopt a child?” I objected.

  Looking impatient, Marian said, “There were no psychological assessments in those days. Do you know the term ʻgood Christian couple’? They were the sort who could adopt. They had to have enough money to support a child, and a separate bedroom for it. That was all. The Tates were well-off and went to church every week. That was enough.”

  “Still... OK, go on.”

  Finishing the wine in her glass and pouring more for both of us, she went on,: “It’s clear that Mrs T thought of Belinda as a possession, not a person. She thought she’d bought her, like a cat or a dog. She bullied and nagged her, controlled her, used her as a way of controlling other people. In the end
they hated each other. But Mrs Tate’s mental image of herself was of a perfect wife and mother, so she could never admit she’d done anything wrong.”

  “I’ve known a few like that. Fantasists. No insight.”

  “So’ve I,” she agreed sourly. “Anyway, I don’t know what’s cause and what’s effect, but Mrs Tate was obviously unhappy in her marriage, she’d married the wrong man. She was twenty-seven when she married, which in those days, the 1930s, meant she was an old maid. Nice-looking girl, had money, her own car, should’ve had boyfriends but she frightened them away with her temper and demands. Mr Tate met her at a wedding, and it was the first time he’d been to the city – he was over thirty and had spent his whole life on that farm down in the south-east, had never gone anywhere or done anything, knew nothing. But he came to that wedding, met Mrs T – Miss Fanning, as she was – and fell in love with her, God knows why. She married him because he was the only man who ever asked her. It was a disaster from the start, within three months she was home again with a mouthful of excuses, but her mother, who knew all about her, sent her straight home again. And so it went on, Mrs T always trying to get away from her husband and the farm, she loathed the country, couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to be a farmer’s wife. To be fair to her, which I do reluctantly, she’d been used to a very different life, her parents were well-off, cosmopolitan, educated, and she’d always had the best, and suddenly she was stuck down in the middle of nowhere with a man who was all but illiterate and thought of nothing but his damn farm. Still, she was better off than a lot of women, for her husband doted on her, let her get away with everything, would’ve given her the moon. Well, as long as it didn’t actually cost him money.”

  Remembering something from part of her manuscript I said, “But weren’t they quite well off?”

  “Yes, but he was just very tight with money. He didn’t understand money. Really he had no idea how much things cost, or how other people lived. He thought he was poor. He’d spend if he had to, on something of good quality, but whatever it was had to last forever. He bought one new car in twenty years. At eighteen Belinda was still wearing the winter coat he bought her when she started high school.

  “Look, I’ve talked to a lot of people who knew the Tates. I needed that sort of background, you see. And I heard from someone who knew Mrs T that there were sexual problems. No one talked about that sort of thing in those days but apparently it was pretty obvious she loathed anything to do with sex. Once she insulted a friend whose husband had just been sent to England to join the RAF, 1941 this was, and the friend was horribly upset, of course, and Winsome Tate said something like, 'You must be glad to have him out of the way for a good long time, you won’t have to put up with all that filthy nonsense men want all the time. If you’re lucky he’ll be killed.’ Well, you can imagine… Mr Tate didn’t go to war, as a farmer he was in a reserved occupation, and making money hand over fist during the war when the army needed meat and milk and wool and wheat. But she, Mrs T, would rather he’d been on active service a long way away for a long time, or dead, than put up with sex. Mr T was quite certainly absolutely ignorant about that sort of thing when they married, and so probably was she, and obviously it horrified her. I suppose her married life was a series of painful rapes.”

  “Why didn’t she leave him?” I interrupted, and Marian said, annoyed and rather sad,

  “Women didn’t in those days. They put up with things. Her mother wouldn’t have let her come home, she’d had enough of her and probably she thought, as many people did back then, that she had to lump it. Winsome had some money after her mother died, but she’d never been trained for a job, and by all accounts she was too lazy to work, and not all that bright. Probably she didn’t want to admit she’d failed at being married – or she realised that on the whole she wasn’t too badly off, really. Mr T wasn’t violent or abusive in any way. She could’ve done worse.”

  “Abusive to Belinda, from what her cousin said when you interviewed her.”

  “Yes,” Marian snapped. “That was pretty vile. To put it crudely, I think he wasn’t getting any from his wife, so he started on Belinda. One woman I interviewed said he never actually actually raped Belinda, because that would’ve been committing adultery. Someone who knew them said he was so ignorant and even innocent he probably didn’t even quite understand that what he was doing was sexual.”

  “Like hell. That’s what they all say. Or they say the child likes it, or wants it too.”

  “I know. I think Belinda loved him until all that started. Mrs T knew, of course, and did nothing to stop it. Better Belinda than her, she probably thought. It’s horrible – but one thing I’ve learnt, studying history, is that things really were different in the past. People thought differently, didn’t know as much as we do, things that horrify us were normal, or at least were kept quiet.”

  “Paedophile priests. Child abuse. Creepy entertainers.”

  “All that and more. Racism, sexism, slavery… so very, very much of it.”

  “My mother knew a lot about history and she used to say that the truest words ever written are: 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’”

  “Absolutely.” Idly she added, “I read The Go-Between at school. I must read it again... See, I’m only thirty-two, so all this background is stuff I’ve had to learn, things my parents and older people have had to explain to me, and I have trouble getting the kids I teach to understand it. They think things were always like they are now. That’s why I put so much about the 1960s into the introduction to my book – I was talking about it in a uni tutorial, and some of the kids flatly refused to believe that it was normal for the Tates not to be on the phone here. One actually asked if the cops had been able to track Belinda’s cell phone.”

  “As they always do on CSI and that sort of thing.” I laughed, because, like her, I was – just – old enough to remember a time before mobile phones. Dad had bought one, a hefty big thing, in 1990. I hadn’t been allowed one until I turned eighteen.

  Marian stood up to take one of the folders from her desk. Rather bitterly she said, “The rotten thing is that none of what happened to Belinda could happen today. Oh, I know there’s plenty of child abuse and rape and incest and violence, plenty of horrors, some things are actually worse today, but at least today a girl like her – and she was bright, she’d’ve tried to get help – would have people to protect her.” She re-filled our wine glasses – we were on the second bottle – took a hefty swig, and went on, “Also, of course, in those days the age of majority was twenty-one. She’d’ve had more than two more years stuck with her parents. It wasn’t until 1971 that the age was lowered to eighteen. Too late for Belinda.

  “Well, long story as short as possible, when Belinda was thirteen Mrs T insisted on her going to one of the posh private girls schools here, but she wouldn’t let her go as a boarder, oh no, that would’ve let Belinda get away from her, out of her control. So they came up here and moved in with Mrs T’s mother, leaving Mr T down on the farm. He’d come up for the odd weekend, they’d go down there in school holidays – and I have to say that Belinda loathed the country at least as much as Mrs T did, it was the one thing they had in common.

  “Mrs T’s mother died in 1962, the year they came to live here, and Mrs T went into melt-down and there was no one left to control her or protect Belinda. Everyone who knew them agrees the girl had a horrible time – mental and physical abuse.

  “Belinda wanted to go to uni, and she was quite bright enough, very intelligent indeed, but of course the Tates wouldn’t let her. So they sent her to a business school to learn to be a shorthand typist. Christ, the girl was a member of Mensa and they thought she should be a typist! So, when she finished that, she got a job, and Mr T made Mrs go back to the farm, leaving Belinda in a women’s hostel in the city. Everyone agrees Belinda changed enormously that year, away from that bitch at last, she grew up, matured, could do what she wanted – which was mostly to read and take night clas
ses and save money to go to uni when she was twenty-one.

  “Of course it couldn’t last. Mrs T had some huge fight with her husband, over sex, according to a cousin of Mr T’s who lived with them and eventually inherited the farm.” I nodded, half-amused, remembering that part from the manuscript she’d sent me. “About then another cousin, Mr T’s nephew, was killed in Vietnam, and of course they were all here for the funeral. And a week later, in mid-November, Mrs T dragged Belinda out of that hostel and forced her to come back here to live in this ghastly flat. She lied to everyone, said she’d found out Belinda was getting into trouble, drinking – the Tates were rabid teetotallers, or at least he was and she pretended to be – and running around with men.

  “It lasted nearly a month. A month in which Belinda was more or less kept prisoner, only allowed out to go to work, beaten up… when the cops finally searched the house they found indications that she’d been kept locked in the cellar… the people she worked with worried about her, they’d see her coming into work covered in cuts and bruises, she lost a lot of weight. Somehow she managed to see a doctor who put her on tranquillisers. Her mother chopped her hair off one day.”

  “What! What?”

  “Yes.” Marian ran a hand through her own hair. “Belinda had lovely hair, thick, blonde, and she’d let it grow all that year. One day she turned up at work with it all hacked off short at the back, a total mess. She told her friends at work that Mrs T had snuck up behind her and chopped it off. Out of spite. Belinda was quite an attractive girl and Mrs T couldn’t take that.